Tim Hetherington was not a war photographer, not in the conventional sense at least. To be sure, a tour of his photographic career is a tour of war zones: the Second Liberian Civil War, Afghanistan under American occupation, the 2011 Libyan Civil War, where Hetherington was killed by Libyan forces, either by a mortar shell or an RPG. He was 40.
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Why shouldn’t we think of Hetherington as a war photographer then, seeing how he lived—and died—photographing violence across Africa and the Middle East, far away from his native England? Well, for one thing, he wouldn’t have wanted us to think of him that way: simply as an objective chronicler of conflict, an outside observer of other people’s suffering. Instead, Hetherington’s work was often about acknowledging the relationship between photographer and subject, rather than hiding it. In this way, Hetherington was far from the chaotic point-and-shoot chameleon we associate with war photography. His images slow down war and examine its quiet moments. They invite us to think about war rather than just look at it.
This thoughtful approach to photographing war is currently on display at London’s Imperial War Museum. Running through September 29, “Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington” covers the key periods of Hetherington’s career and features films and artifacts from his life. But it’s the photographs that give the exhibition its weight.
Rather than attempting to be an invisible presence, Hetherington was in........